Do I think that having Thom dedicate his worktime on LinuxMCE for a year? Absolutely. Do I think that a kickstarter campaign will attract even 10% of Thom's desired goal? Not in a million years.

Let's face it: The people who are using LinuxMCE these days are mainly cheapskates. They use it cause it is free as in beer. Some are here, cause they think they can make a quick buck out of it for clients.

This seems a little harsh. There are many of us who are not expert programmers, but are somewhat tech savvy, who like the idea of home automation, but who can't plunk down $50-100,000 for a Crestron system. A professionally installed system is out of reach for many of us, so that puts us in DIY territory. Does that make us cheapskates? Maybe it does, so we'll go with that name. Just because a cheapskate can't pay thousands of dollars for a professionally installed system, that doesn't mean he won't pry open his wallet and give $100 to help support his DIY community. But a cheapskate expects a return on his investment, so let's discus this in a little more depth.

The LMCE community is shaped like a pyramid, with the ignorant freeloading masses at the bottom and Thom up there at the top. If we want our community to thrive, we have to reach as far down the pyramid as possible and get those freeloading cheapskates (like me) to contribute their time and money. But here's the rub. LMCE doesn't have much value to the guys at the bottom of the pyramid because they can't get it to work right. Crumble hit it right on the head when he pointed the finger at documentation.

documentation is lacking. I remember when I started using LMCE, there were like 15 articles on each problem that arose for me. There are WAY fewer issues these days but the documentation is just not there like it used to be. Perfect example, vdpau. If I am setting up an nvidia card where do i put my vdpau settings. Was easy to find that vdpau was an option for LMCE but finding where to set it for a newbie would take a while. Then if you read about nvidia cards the new drivers are made to work best with opengl for hardware acceleration. So opengl and vdpau for deinterlace seem to work best for me(I will document this, just figured it out). My point is, us as users need to start documenting everything we learn about LMCE(as you would to a beginner of linux). I think this will help the community grow tremendously. Then guru's like tschack can do what they love, and we all benefit.

Instead of belittling the cheapskates, we should value them and try our best to educate them. Then they stick around, they use the program, they become developers, they contribute money, and we build a thriving community. This is a cultural shift that requires the guys farther up the pyramid to put some time into documentation and making sure that the most important features are easy to use. Just sayin.

Definitely the UI is the worst thing. At least it can be edited, although with quite a bit of work and a lot of know how. qOrbiter will improve this exponentially. I think the worst thing about the UI is that it doesnt support feedback or any type of advanced controls (such as sliders). I install the expensive stuff like crestron, savant, and control4. Thats really the only plus they have. Crestron has an easy to use screen editor but everything has to be done from scratch (no automatic scenarios or screens), control4 doesnt allow you to edit the screens, and savant is just a pita to make changes to anything that was automatic and you better hope that a change you make doesn't require you to have to start over (no undo). But even for devices that have been supported from the beginning such as HVAC, it doesn't give you a nice UI to actually control your ac, they are still just scenarios. I might go ahead and attempt to make this screen, its just coming up with an xp machine again that i can install the editor on again.